They're changing because the H-1B cap is being reached now. An international student who graduates in the US no longer has a clear path to stick around and work. There's no point spending four years training someone only to kick them out when they want to stay. With 29 months, they can at least make a couple of attempts at the annual H-1B lottery.
I'm actually surprised to see this happen. I honestly thought things would remain pretty static until we saw a new government take over. This is really great news for the US tech industry. Hopefully a sign of more change to come.
If anyone can dig up the link. Bill Gates's full testimony that's referenced was a very interesting view. It's surprising what a wide variety of viewpoints the different members of the committee present.
Also, if going in for the first time as an adult, it would be good to have a reason for it. As in "I failed x courses last term" or "I'm getting really bad reviews at work." I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure part of the diagnosis is showing that it is having a negative effect on your life.
Prescriptions for the drugs in question are typically made for daily use. If you had a psychological disorder, why would you only want it once a week? (Considering that prescriptions are being given to address a problem.)
The people only taking it weekly or monthly would be the ones who likely aren't on a regimented plan with their doctors. Or, just as likely, lie to their doctors by playing up problems to jump through the hoops required to get what they consider to be the modern caffeine and use it however they want afterwards. If you don't use it every day, well, big deal, you can hand extra to a friend, sell, throw out, whatever.
All I really want to say is that the daily users are the ones who aren't 'abusing' it. They're following their doctor's direction.
I agree with you. It's just less of a fun process if you don't have a regular doctor who knows you. Since these drugs can be sold illegally or used to get high in a very non-productive kind of way, they can be a little suspicious.
Sadly the "I'm curious and I just want to try it out" feeling is easiest to fulfill by asking a friend for some of their extra pills, especially if you're in a university environment.
Something you have + something you know = secure enough for me to use in the wild. I want networked ATM,etc machines that accept smart cards. The card has a certificate or somesuch that can not be copied. The bank fires a challenge 'question' to the card. The card uses it's secret information to answer it. Then the transaction proceeds. As soon as you walk away with the card, the pin used to authorize things is useless. Something you have + something you know. I like the one time authorization scheme people mention as well. I'd use with one-time purchases with small retailers.
The DRM accepts you if you're logged in to live using the account it was purchased on. The alternative is that you're on the console it was purchased on. So you can play games on a friend's 360 for example, but you have to log in. He's complaining because his internet connection goes down frequently and he wants to play offline.
While it's true the SPs contain all the patches to date, there's a lot more to them. It's a chance to ship all the minor bugfixes that aren't worth releasing as a patch (too expensive). The service pack also gets significantly more testing than the small patches. So unless a bug is *hugely* problematic, a fix won't see the light of day until a service pack is released.
Um. You might want to do some fact-checking. Vista was not built from scratch. The shipping code base started with the forking of windows server 2003. The bulk of the development occurred after the windows team shipped XP SP2 in Aug 2004 and shifted their focus to the new OS. I think you underestimate the amount of time it would take to develop a modern full-feature OS from scratch.
Why would you make such strong impressions of a world-wide microsoft culture of 80,000 people based on whatever you saw in redmond? Or that of the mid/upper management you've probably never met?
And as far as the tech they arguably already have... what properties does Yahoo have that Microsoft doesn't have a fairly strong competitor to? Perhaps I just don't know the yahoo brand as well as you do but flickr stands out as being about the only major bullet on the list? So from the consumer standpoint, it does seem like MS is making this purchase for the technology. Instead, they're probably after the market-share and engineering talent. I don't know the advertising market well enough to know what's in their platform that isn't in the MS/aQuantive-developed platforms.
Besides, if there was rampant overconfidence, why would MS buy anything at all?
You can instead type machinename_or_domain\username. Not the same thing but it's not as if you're blocked from logging in as a specific user. Depending on taste, it's nice to just having to type that instead of going "oups, I have the wrong dropdown." But totally a fair criticism.
As for 2, I'm not sure what you mean. They've moved some things out of My Documents but it's all still in the "documents and settings" (now Users) area. They've also exposed more of that to the user by a creating a link to your user's root folder from the start menu. Some of those folders are, such as AppData, are understandably set hidden so this scheme works well for the novice.
Okay, the parent would be flamebait if responding specifically to vista. But if you want to interpret that differently, I think they have a good point and shouldn't be modded down.
600 pages isn't that much of a commentary for many products. Surely I could imagine a 600 page book on 'FireFox annoyances' and how to fix them, eg install adblock. For something the size of an operating system, 600 pages is nothing. You could write 600 useful pages of troubleshooting and tricks for almost any core feature from audio to networking.
Congrats to all the winners! Tons of hard work I'm sure and some impressive results! I'm going to enjoy reading all the postmortems and such. This research really interests me. I love all the creative use of algorithms and technology. Again, congrats and well done!
Windows Mobile targets business customers first and foremost. I don't see the gphone having anything like the outlook/exchange combo that sells those devices. The gphone is going to be targeting kids first I guess with their ad-driven and novel economics + feature set. Just my interpretation of the rumours.
I call BS. You have no evidence to support the notion that Facebook's value will be halved in six months. What do you mean by worth? Earnings? (they just closed a massive advertising deal with MS today) Popularity? (they almost doubled in unique users in the last year) Consumer value? (more and more apps for everything from hockey pools and fantasy stocks to music players , IM, and games are being added by 3rd parties all the time)...
I just don't get the naysayers. MySpace is still worth a ton of money, more than when it was purchased. And it also STILL makes a TON of money on advertising. They still have a very passionate user-base, regardless of how many people (like myself) hugely prefer facebook. If you claim everyone will jump ship to something else, at least give examples of what you think they'll jump to? I personally don't know of anything that has comparable features or growth.
You might have better luck with a car stereo that fully supports the ipod so you get all the playlists up on screen, can scroll through them, pick what you want, charge while you drive, etc.
I'm trying to buy a new car right now and it kills me that the cars I'm serious about don't have full native ipod integration options. I want the built in nav to get the proper voice controls, buttons on the steering wheel, etc, but then I lose out on proper ipod integration. It's basically a pain in the ass.
I think the big reason is they don't want the ipod to eat into iphone sales. An iphone with a hard drive would be too big. No one wants that fat of a phone. But if you had to pick between a phone of your choice + 160 gb ipod touch or just an 8gb iphone, a lot of people would probably skip the iphone. Right now, the iphone actually gives you functionality you can't get anywhere else (though some would argue this all day long..). After all, Apple makes a good bit of change off the contracts. I think it was what? $8 / month comes back to them from contracts. So if they put something out that will steal iphone subscribers, it had damn well better make up that $192 in another way. So in short, a classic HD based ipod with the touch interface doesn't make business sense right now.
University students who don't have/carry laptops. After all, what campus doesn't have WiFi? If you ask me, this is pretty good entertainment for the hours of boring classes coming this september..
I get that you're making a joke but I may as well for those who don't have one.. There are four buttons on the phone itself and another on the headphones. You've also got all the accessories and bluetooth. Depending how deep the hackers get in there, we might see something like the PS3 controller connecting to the phone. OSX can be made to support something like that. I'm still from the "just buy a psp/ds" camp but I still love creative hacks. Games are clearly not what I care about (compared to say, a skype client) but everyone likes to geek-out once in a while:)
I wonder if the kids can get a package deal and go to Jesus Camp too
Re:AT&T Math? Misleading advertising?
on
All Things iPhone
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nothing of the level of skype is technically possible with the developer support they've offered. You won't be able to work around it. The web-apps they're supporting are little more than very basic web pages. You don't even get javascript support (so no AJAX apps), let alone anything a little more sophisticated like flash. They've made very big talk out of an undisclosed programming interfaces they've suggested. This will allow access to some information like your address book. These will in no way, shape, or form add sophisticated support. You CAN NOT run custom code on the iphone, period. You can't even get the iphone itself to count to ten (outside of their basic calculator app, heh). Seriously. In this kind of server-side webapp model, with nothing more than html/css, anything like skype, an MSN client, live maps, etc is entirely out of the question.
My opinion is that there's an extremely good chance this is part of Apple's contract/business plan with AT&T. They've locked it down like crazy to force you into paying significantly high fees for things like SMS. Do NOT expect to be able to use MSN/AIM/Skype/ANYTHING with the iphone. You're guaranteed to be disappointed until a time when Apple changes their mind and contract obligations are fulfilled. AT&T won't budge an inch on this either. They've already signed Apple for five years. At this point, Apple's motivation behind rich-application support is extremely suspect. We can't hope/assume they'll all of a sudden just "change their mind." Their strong-willed stance on this suggests there is no change in sight. Be smart and don't assume things will be rosey. It's not a phone that will save you money down the road. It will push your monthly bills up, especially with international/roaming issues like those I'm expecting. I'll have a windows mobile handset for travel. Those, at least, can be picked up on the cheap from ebay easily enough.
Consider yourself warned;)
But by all means, expect all the built in stuff to work wonderfully. YouTube/web will be slow on edge but otherwise I completely expect an as-advertised performer. Those who haven't geeked-out with other smart-phones just won't know what they're missing. We're a small crowd (and they intend to keep things that way!).
AT&T Math? Misleading advertising?
on
All Things iPhone
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From AT&T's description of their $20/month 'unlimited' (excludes international/roaming) SMS texting plan:
Messaging Unlimited
You have the freedom to message any way to any one - text, picture, video and IM - without worrying what each message costs. That means every message counts the same. You can send and receive ANY combination of messages. Want to send all picture messages? No problem. All IMs? Go ahead and chat away - send and receive messages for less than pennies per day! What does "less than pennies per day" mean? What does that even mean?!! Okay, when I think "pennies," I don't think 66 of them. At that point, I think we're talking "quarters per day" not "less than pennies per day." Is $0.99/min roaming "pennies per minute?"
Added to the fact that the links throughout their rates site keep casually dumping you back to voice-plan information as you navigate between sections and such, they're really pissing me off by making information as hard as possible to find AND read. Anything that doesn't read like it came from a lawyer may as well be an outright lie it's so misleading.
I can't wait to get charged for incoming messages every weekend while roaming in Canada.. at least with WiFi I can finally dodge data-rate raping (otherwise 50kb/$1, perhaps $1-2 per page view these days! YouTube? I'm scared it'll unlock and I'll bump the icon in my pocket..)
When AT&T coughs up their next north america plan, I damned well better be able to switch to it. If I can't, that'd be a deal-breaker.
And yes, I use all the skype like tricks whenever possible... too bad I can't do wifi+skype on the iphone. But it's their misleading advertising I want to bring up rather than starting a skype/whatever thread.
Oh well, hopefully only another few years of this bullshit until we're able to get all this for free wherever an internet connection is available. I suppose we've all been thinking that for a while..
Oh well. I'll give it a shot on friday and if the new shinyness isn't truly worth the massive massive additional cost, I will be returning this phone.
Get a "mail" machine. I have one machine used as a gateway to the others. It essentially runs outlook, IM, and web. I terminal into all the other machines I do actual work on from there. Pandora/winamp/whatever run fine since there aren't any hogs on that machine. The added bonus is that I can copy/paste between dev/test/repro machines etc. File sharing is configured at a domain level so I don't have to worry about configuring that. It works well. The answer is ALWAYS more hardware!!:)
Google Gears has the potential to give the iphone some of the most responsive web apps.. but that's probably a year off, six months minimum. First we need gears, then we need 3rd party support. I also really wonder how well it can handle background tasks. I'd love to have a gtalk/msn client sitting around, even if it is forced into a ridiculously slow web pull model. Good thing I can afford both an iphone AND a windows mobile device.
I think the iphone has some potential. I'm just sure there must be a conspiracy around blocking real IM clients. Honestly, I think that's the only reason they've chosen this model. SMS is too lucrative a business. It sickens me but I like how shiny it is... damnit!
But come on! They need an open push-model platform somehow! I don't care about the business customer, this is about MSN, AIM, Facebook, myspace, etc. Kids need this stuff too!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Microsoft is expanding very quickly in canada, china, and india right now. I would say the biggest cause for that right is the H-1B cap.
They're changing because the H-1B cap is being reached now. An international student who graduates in the US no longer has a clear path to stick around and work. There's no point spending four years training someone only to kick them out when they want to stay. With 29 months, they can at least make a couple of attempts at the annual H-1B lottery.
I'm actually surprised to see this happen. I honestly thought things would remain pretty static until we saw a new government take over. This is really great news for the US tech industry. Hopefully a sign of more change to come.
If anyone can dig up the link. Bill Gates's full testimony that's referenced was a very interesting view. It's surprising what a wide variety of viewpoints the different members of the committee present.
Also, if going in for the first time as an adult, it would be good to have a reason for it. As in "I failed x courses last term" or "I'm getting really bad reviews at work." I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure part of the diagnosis is showing that it is having a negative effect on your life.
Prescriptions for the drugs in question are typically made for daily use. If you had a psychological disorder, why would you only want it once a week? (Considering that prescriptions are being given to address a problem.)
The people only taking it weekly or monthly would be the ones who likely aren't on a regimented plan with their doctors. Or, just as likely, lie to their doctors by playing up problems to jump through the hoops required to get what they consider to be the modern caffeine and use it however they want afterwards. If you don't use it every day, well, big deal, you can hand extra to a friend, sell, throw out, whatever.
All I really want to say is that the daily users are the ones who aren't 'abusing' it. They're following their doctor's direction.
I agree with you. It's just less of a fun process if you don't have a regular doctor who knows you. Since these drugs can be sold illegally or used to get high in a very non-productive kind of way, they can be a little suspicious.
Sadly the "I'm curious and I just want to try it out" feeling is easiest to fulfill by asking a friend for some of their extra pills, especially if you're in a university environment.
Something you have + something you know = secure enough for me to use in the wild. I want networked ATM,etc machines that accept smart cards. The card has a certificate or somesuch that can not be copied. The bank fires a challenge 'question' to the card. The card uses it's secret information to answer it. Then the transaction proceeds. As soon as you walk away with the card, the pin used to authorize things is useless. Something you have + something you know. I like the one time authorization scheme people mention as well. I'd use with one-time purchases with small retailers.
The DRM accepts you if you're logged in to live using the account it was purchased on. The alternative is that you're on the console it was purchased on. So you can play games on a friend's 360 for example, but you have to log in. He's complaining because his internet connection goes down frequently and he wants to play offline.
While it's true the SPs contain all the patches to date, there's a lot more to them. It's a chance to ship all the minor bugfixes that aren't worth releasing as a patch (too expensive). The service pack also gets significantly more testing than the small patches. So unless a bug is *hugely* problematic, a fix won't see the light of day until a service pack is released.
Um. You might want to do some fact-checking. Vista was not built from scratch. The shipping code base started with the forking of windows server 2003. The bulk of the development occurred after the windows team shipped XP SP2 in Aug 2004 and shifted their focus to the new OS. I think you underestimate the amount of time it would take to develop a modern full-feature OS from scratch.
Why would you make such strong impressions of a world-wide microsoft culture of 80,000 people based on whatever you saw in redmond? Or that of the mid/upper management you've probably never met?
And as far as the tech they arguably already have... what properties does Yahoo have that Microsoft doesn't have a fairly strong competitor to? Perhaps I just don't know the yahoo brand as well as you do but flickr stands out as being about the only major bullet on the list? So from the consumer standpoint, it does seem like MS is making this purchase for the technology. Instead, they're probably after the market-share and engineering talent. I don't know the advertising market well enough to know what's in their platform that isn't in the MS/aQuantive-developed platforms.
Besides, if there was rampant overconfidence, why would MS buy anything at all?
You can instead type machinename_or_domain\username. Not the same thing but it's not as if you're blocked from logging in as a specific user. Depending on taste, it's nice to just having to type that instead of going "oups, I have the wrong dropdown." But totally a fair criticism.
As for 2, I'm not sure what you mean. They've moved some things out of My Documents but it's all still in the "documents and settings" (now Users) area. They've also exposed more of that to the user by a creating a link to your user's root folder from the start menu. Some of those folders are, such as AppData, are understandably set hidden so this scheme works well for the novice.
Okay, the parent would be flamebait if responding specifically to vista. But if you want to interpret that differently, I think they have a good point and shouldn't be modded down.
:)
600 pages isn't that much of a commentary for many products. Surely I could imagine a 600 page book on 'FireFox annoyances' and how to fix them, eg install adblock. For something the size of an operating system, 600 pages is nothing. You could write 600 useful pages of troubleshooting and tricks for almost any core feature from audio to networking.
600 lbs does sound a little more authoritative
Congrats to all the winners! Tons of hard work I'm sure and some impressive results! I'm going to enjoy reading all the postmortems and such. This research really interests me. I love all the creative use of algorithms and technology. Again, congrats and well done!
Windows Mobile targets business customers first and foremost. I don't see the gphone having anything like the outlook/exchange combo that sells those devices. The gphone is going to be targeting kids first I guess with their ad-driven and novel economics + feature set. Just my interpretation of the rumours.
I call BS. You have no evidence to support the notion that Facebook's value will be halved in six months. What do you mean by worth? Earnings? (they just closed a massive advertising deal with MS today) Popularity? (they almost doubled in unique users in the last year) Consumer value? (more and more apps for everything from hockey pools and fantasy stocks to music players , IM, and games are being added by 3rd parties all the time) ...
I just don't get the naysayers. MySpace is still worth a ton of money, more than when it was purchased. And it also STILL makes a TON of money on advertising. They still have a very passionate user-base, regardless of how many people (like myself) hugely prefer facebook. If you claim everyone will jump ship to something else, at least give examples of what you think they'll jump to? I personally don't know of anything that has comparable features or growth.
Please, explain....
You might have better luck with a car stereo that fully supports the ipod so you get all the playlists up on screen, can scroll through them, pick what you want, charge while you drive, etc.
I'm trying to buy a new car right now and it kills me that the cars I'm serious about don't have full native ipod integration options. I want the built in nav to get the proper voice controls, buttons on the steering wheel, etc, but then I lose out on proper ipod integration. It's basically a pain in the ass.
I think the big reason is they don't want the ipod to eat into iphone sales. An iphone with a hard drive would be too big. No one wants that fat of a phone. But if you had to pick between a phone of your choice + 160 gb ipod touch or just an 8gb iphone, a lot of people would probably skip the iphone. Right now, the iphone actually gives you functionality you can't get anywhere else (though some would argue this all day long..). After all, Apple makes a good bit of change off the contracts. I think it was what? $8 / month comes back to them from contracts. So if they put something out that will steal iphone subscribers, it had damn well better make up that $192 in another way. So in short, a classic HD based ipod with the touch interface doesn't make business sense right now.
University students who don't have/carry laptops. After all, what campus doesn't have WiFi? If you ask me, this is pretty good entertainment for the hours of boring classes coming this september..
I get that you're making a joke but I may as well for those who don't have one.. There are four buttons on the phone itself and another on the headphones. You've also got all the accessories and bluetooth. Depending how deep the hackers get in there, we might see something like the PS3 controller connecting to the phone. OSX can be made to support something like that. I'm still from the "just buy a psp/ds" camp but I still love creative hacks. Games are clearly not what I care about (compared to say, a skype client) but everyone likes to geek-out once in a while :)
Sign up with SOCAN. Look around there first. Google it if you need more.
I wonder if the kids can get a package deal and go to Jesus Camp too
Nothing of the level of skype is technically possible with the developer support they've offered. You won't be able to work around it. The web-apps they're supporting are little more than very basic web pages. You don't even get javascript support (so no AJAX apps), let alone anything a little more sophisticated like flash. They've made very big talk out of an undisclosed programming interfaces they've suggested. This will allow access to some information like your address book. These will in no way, shape, or form add sophisticated support. You CAN NOT run custom code on the iphone, period. You can't even get the iphone itself to count to ten (outside of their basic calculator app, heh). Seriously. In this kind of server-side webapp model, with nothing more than html/css, anything like skype, an MSN client, live maps, etc is entirely out of the question.
;)
My opinion is that there's an extremely good chance this is part of Apple's contract/business plan with AT&T. They've locked it down like crazy to force you into paying significantly high fees for things like SMS. Do NOT expect to be able to use MSN/AIM/Skype/ANYTHING with the iphone. You're guaranteed to be disappointed until a time when Apple changes their mind and contract obligations are fulfilled. AT&T won't budge an inch on this either. They've already signed Apple for five years. At this point, Apple's motivation behind rich-application support is extremely suspect. We can't hope/assume they'll all of a sudden just "change their mind." Their strong-willed stance on this suggests there is no change in sight. Be smart and don't assume things will be rosey. It's not a phone that will save you money down the road. It will push your monthly bills up, especially with international/roaming issues like those I'm expecting. I'll have a windows mobile handset for travel. Those, at least, can be picked up on the cheap from ebay easily enough.
Consider yourself warned
But by all means, expect all the built in stuff to work wonderfully. YouTube/web will be slow on edge but otherwise I completely expect an as-advertised performer. Those who haven't geeked-out with other smart-phones just won't know what they're missing. We're a small crowd (and they intend to keep things that way!).
You have the freedom to message any way to any one - text, picture, video and IM - without worrying what each message costs. That means every message counts the same. You can send and receive ANY combination of messages. Want to send all picture messages? No problem. All IMs? Go ahead and chat away - send and receive messages for less than pennies per day! What does "less than pennies per day" mean? What does that even mean?!! Okay, when I think "pennies," I don't think 66 of them. At that point, I think we're talking "quarters per day" not "less than pennies per day." Is $0.99/min roaming "pennies per minute?"
Added to the fact that the links throughout their rates site keep casually dumping you back to voice-plan information as you navigate between sections and such, they're really pissing me off by making information as hard as possible to find AND read. Anything that doesn't read like it came from a lawyer may as well be an outright lie it's so misleading.
I can't wait to get charged for incoming messages every weekend while roaming in Canada.. at least with WiFi I can finally dodge data-rate raping (otherwise 50kb/$1, perhaps $1-2 per page view these days! YouTube? I'm scared it'll unlock and I'll bump the icon in my pocket..)
When AT&T coughs up their next north america plan, I damned well better be able to switch to it. If I can't, that'd be a deal-breaker.
And yes, I use all the skype like tricks whenever possible... too bad I can't do wifi+skype on the iphone. But it's their misleading advertising I want to bring up rather than starting a skype/whatever thread.
Oh well, hopefully only another few years of this bullshit until we're able to get all this for free wherever an internet connection is available. I suppose we've all been thinking that for a while..
Oh well. I'll give it a shot on friday and if the new shinyness isn't truly worth the massive massive additional cost, I will be returning this phone.
Get a "mail" machine. I have one machine used as a gateway to the others. It essentially runs outlook, IM, and web. I terminal into all the other machines I do actual work on from there. Pandora/winamp/whatever run fine since there aren't any hogs on that machine. The added bonus is that I can copy/paste between dev/test/repro machines etc. File sharing is configured at a domain level so I don't have to worry about configuring that. It works well. The answer is ALWAYS more hardware!! :)
Google Gears has the potential to give the iphone some of the most responsive web apps.. but that's probably a year off, six months minimum. First we need gears, then we need 3rd party support. I also really wonder how well it can handle background tasks. I'd love to have a gtalk/msn client sitting around, even if it is forced into a ridiculously slow web pull model. Good thing I can afford both an iphone AND a windows mobile device.
I think the iphone has some potential. I'm just sure there must be a conspiracy around blocking real IM clients. Honestly, I think that's the only reason they've chosen this model. SMS is too lucrative a business. It sickens me but I like how shiny it is... damnit!
But come on! They need an open push-model platform somehow! I don't care about the business customer, this is about MSN, AIM, Facebook, myspace, etc. Kids need this stuff too!